When GOP backed the mandate

The proposed requirement that all Americans have health insurance is based on fairness. The mandate is central to Democratic President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul — and fiercely opposed by Republicans. The U.S. Supreme Court is due to consider its constitutionality next month.

The mandate’s goal is to ensure that when people need health care — and everyone does, eventually — their bill is not handed to the rest of society. That bill today is about $40 billion a year.

An early advocate of the mandate explained it this way: “If a young man wrecks his Porsche and has not had the foresight to obtain insurance, we may commiserate, but society feels no obligation to repair his car. ... But health care is different. If a man is struck down by a heart attack in the street, Americans will care for him whether or not he has insurance.”

What’s interesting is that this advocate is Stuart Butler of the conservative Heritage Foundation, speaking in 1989.

Indeed, Republicans once championed the insurance mandate — particularly during the health care battles of the Clinton administration, when Democrats pressed for a single-payer model or mandatory employer coverage. “Virtually every conservative saw the mandate as a less dangerous future,” says Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House in the 1990s and today a Republican presidential contender.

Another GOP hopeful, Mitt Romney, may not have expected his party to turn against the mandate when it was part of the Massachusetts health insurance overhaul he signed as governor. In fact, Obama himself opposed the mandate when he and Hillary Clinton were jousting for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.

Obama came around. Republicans, too, are entitled to change their minds. But all that flip-flopping ought to drain some of the venom from today’s claims that a mandate is creeping socialism or a threat to constitutional liberty.